


Parallel Adventures

by SpaceTimeConundrum



Series: Any Universe [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Light Angst, Pete's World, Romance, Science Fiction, Surprises
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:45:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceTimeConundrum/pseuds/SpaceTimeConundrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New name; new job; new, new relationship. But trouble's still the same, even on a parallel world. The Metacrisis!Doctor and Rose try to settle in to a "normal" life together on Pete's World; this, as you can imagine, isn't easy, especially when the Cybermen return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue - A Doctor By Any Other Name

He was John now, that was different. Sure, he'd been introducing himself in various situations over the centuries as John Smith, but it had always simply been a convenient alias. Now he was a new man; a bit more literally than was usual for even him. And if he was going to spend the rest of his life as a more or less human man on Earth, he needed a proper human name. He'd complained about the necessity at the time but now he secretly welcomed the opportunity to distinguish himself from his other, fully Time Lord, counterpart. As much as he wanted Rose to know that he was the same man who loved her and had shown her the stars, he had to accept that he couldn't be that same man going forward. That man couldn't spend his life with her; he would.

Adopting his former alias wholesale had been vetoed for a few reasons, chief among them being that it felt wrong to use it for himself when he recalled the fate of a certain other John Smith in 1913. He'd used it since the incident with the Family of Blood, but only sparingly, never for anything permanent like this would be. Now he'd be living a version of the human life he'd denied that man and the memories made him uneasy.

He and Rose quite liked John though and decided to keep it. He'd floundered at selecting the rest until she suggested that he borrow names from people he'd left behind who'd meant a great deal to him. And thus, John Alistair Noble was born. He especially enjoyed how it sounded when Rose first used it on him, rolling the words in her mouth as though tasting the syllables. She'd wrinkled her nose a bit at Alistair, but after he told her a few stories about his friendship with the Brigadier, she agreed it was perfect.

"The Doctor" was now just his official Torchwood designation, though when they were setting up the paperwork for his new identity, they'd given him a PhD in physics, so he could still lay claim to the title. Thankfully, Torchwood's origins in this universe had been wholly unrelated to himself, so the moniker didn't inspire any particular levels of suspicion. Rose still called him Doctor most of the time despite the fact that he'd told her it was okay to call him John since she'd helped him pick the name after all. As time went on, she got better about using it in social situations and he got better about responding when someone called for John or Dr. Noble.

Slowly but surely he was becoming John. In his head, a part of him would probably always still be the Doctor but he'd leave the other, long abandoned names from his past to his Time Lord "brother." He found "hello, I'm John" came to his lips more readily these days and he had to admit (though he'd never tell her) that Rose had been right; people tended to argue with you less when you gave them a proper name.

To most of the people he met, John was a friendly, eccentric bloke with messy hair, an easy smile, penchant for pinstriped suits and trainers, and a positively brilliant mind for science. This came in handy when dealing with the inevitable interest of the press following his mysterious appearance at a formal Vitex event on Rose's arm. He simply charmed the paps into keeping their distance unless there was a public function; how he did this, Rose had no clue. It had taken her months, and a quiet word from Torchwood, to get them to quit following her so much, and they really only stopped after the stars started going out and she spent all her time jumping between universes.

To his fellow Torchwood agents, most of whom were not told the full story of his alien origins, he was an enigma; a passionate genius whose enthusiasm for life and clever gadgets of any kind masked an inner steel that surfaced only occasionally, usually when Rose was being threatened. He was also an even bigger magnet for trouble than she'd been when she'd first started field work, if such a thing were even possible. He'd inspired no less than three betting pools in the office involving his uncanny ability to be at the centre of the biggest messes.

For his own part, the Doctor, no, _John_ , he kept having to correct himself, still wasn't quite sure who this 'John' fellow was yet. Names aside, he kept discovering new differences between his Time Lord self and his new partially human body and Donna-influenced personality. He found that when he got upset now, his accent would get rougher again and laced with more colourful language, a fact that amused Rose but embarrassed him to no end. That was another difference; as a Time Lord, he'd been positively shameless about almost everything, ego the size of a small planet, he'd been accused of, now he found himself feeling considerably less sure of anything he did. Donna had been brilliant despite her insecurities and he knew intellectually that he'd retained all the knowledge and cleverness of the man he'd once been, but that didn't really make it easier to ignore the niggling worries in the back of his mind that he was just a poor copy of the real thing. How he'd managed to convince someone as marvelous and capable as Rose Tyler that he was worth keeping around frankly baffled him.

That was the best thing that John had but the Time Lord didn't: Rose.

He'd fallen in love with her without intending to back when he had another face and refused to venture outside of his TARDIS without the protective armour of his leather coat and that love had carried through into his regeneration. It hadn't exactly been intentional, but he'd regenerated enough times now to recognise the way his new body and personality tended to "correct for" the perceived failings of the last. He was deluding himself if he still tried to cling to the notion that it had been pure coincidence that he'd ended up younger, prettier, and enthusiastically tactile.

He'd changed for her, but coward that he was, once he found himself getting too close, he panicked. Told her in so many words that they couldn't be anything more than friends, agreed to bring Mickey along in the TARDIS to put distance between them, and when Reinette kissed him and took him dancing, he allowed himself to be distracted by an infatuation that couldn't lead anywhere. She had her place in history and he was foolish to think that he could take her with them for any amount of time. The incident ended with everyone hurt; she died waiting for him, Rose never quite looked at him the same after, and he'd lost yet another person whom he'd cared for, no matter how briefly.

It was a testament to how wonderful Rose was that she'd forgiven him for leaving her on a spaceship for five and a half hours to save Reinette. When he'd finished wallowing in his own self-pity and guilt, he'd apologised and tried to make it up to her. After Mickey chose to stay behind in Pete's World, they grew closer still and he felt his resolve to keep his distance wearing thin. He felt something terrible lurking in the timelines that he tried to ignore and clung to her, telling himself he was wrong, and that he'd done so much for the universe already, the least it could do would be to let him keep her. But then the Cybermen and the Daleks came, and she was gone. Forever, he thought; impossible to cross between the universes again.

Lucky for him it turned out that impossible was a very different thing when you were dealing with Rose Tyler.

Of course, then he had to go and throw a spanner in the whole reunion by getting himself shot by a dalek and very nearly regenerating within just a few short minutes of having her back in his arms. If there'd been no dalek, no imminent end of the universe to stop, would he have had the nerve to kiss her? He liked to think that he might have, but then, maybe that was just his new humanity creeping in again.

It still would have ended with him alone at some point though, and because he knew that, he didn't begrudge his counterpart for the hasty decision to send them back to the other universe to live out their human lives together. Heavy-handed and paternalistic, yes, but it was like removing a plaster, best to do it all at once, rather than slowly and painfully. Let the Time Lord have the comforting thought of them alive and happy on another Earth. It was better than watching them age before his eyes, or worse, getting them killed somehow on an alien world. And if they'd stayed, only one of them could really be with Rose; whichever one she chose, it would be agony for the other.

Part of him still worried that Rose might've been happier with the Time Lord. He wouldn't blame her; he really was quite rubbish as a human and it wasn't like they could just up and leave the planet whenever things got a bit sticky now. He knew he had to be driving her spare. He was working on it. Miraculously, it'd been over six months and she hadn't binned him yet. A good sign, certainly. There could be hope for John Noble yet.


	2. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The Doctor blinked and shook his head to clear the sweat that had begun pouring in rivulets down his face and obscuring his vision. Another perk of his newfound humanity, the inability to regulate his own internal temperature as efficiently as he'd been previously accustomed. Before the metacrisis, as he was growing used to thinking of his former life now, he'd simply tweak a few of his metabolic processes and been quite comfortable while his companions glowered enviously at him and began removing articles of clothing to cool off. He was beginning to understand their complaints on a whole new visceral level.

The reason the Doctor found himself drenched in sweat in the dead of winter, or what passed for winter in the milder, global warming impacted, England of Pete's World, was this damned Torchwood mission.

One of the functions of the new, improved and fully governmentally recognized Torchwood was to step in when customs enforcement got a little... extraterrestrial. Strictly speaking, they'd served much the same function before the Cybus Incident as well, but now everything was done through much more official channels. Torchwood was afforded a remarkable degree of discretionary authority but it still had to answer to the President and the House of Commons' Oversight Committee. Mostly, it meant more paperwork and considerably less reliance on Retcon to manage "operational externalities" aka the uncomfortable questions afterwards.

As the planet became more familiar with the concept that humanity was far from alone in the universe, other agencies started to push back against Torchwood's authority, thinking that they were quite capable of handling most issues themselves. Inevitably, this meant that more often than not, Torchwood wasn't called in until situations became exceptionally dire, or needlessly complicated, much to Pete's annoyance and the Doctor's secret glee. The thrill of danger called to him still, mediated only by the gnawing fear for Rose's safety and, when he allowed himself to think about it, his own, now that he'd lost his "get out of death free" card.

This mission had started simply enough; for once they'd been called in fairly early on when a sting operation had uncovered a group smuggling in weapons from a little further away than Eastern Europe. In the interests of keeping a rash of plasma burn injuries out of the casualty wards, Rose had assembled her field team to intercept their latest shipment. It was supposed to have been the Doctor's job to locate and disable their transport system while Rose's agents took the smugglers and contraband into custody. It seemed so routine, that the Doctor thought they probably could have just let the Met handle it. The biggest difference between the police and Torchwood in this instance was really just that all of the Torchwood agents were armed; even the Doctor, or rather _John_ , since he blamed his concession on this point entirely on his new status, had agreed to carry a stun pistol when told that under no circumstances would he be allowed in the field without one.

As always seemed to happen whenever a mission appeared simple, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The weapons smuggling was just the tip of the iceberg, likely being used to finance the other, much more dangerous cargo hidden deeper in the warehouse. Someone was trying to bring a couple hundred Surarin Dromel eggs into the country. Dromels were extremely fierce creatures, approximately a meter high, with razor sharp claws and thick hides. In certain parts of the galaxy, Dromel fighting was a popular form of entertainment. They had a rather nasty reputation for killing their trainers and the occasional unlucky spectators when they got loose. They were extremely quick and had the potential to be much more threatening to the safety of greater London than the shipment of cut-rate plasma disrupters.

That was not what really had him worried though. The eggs needed to be kept at a constant temperature of at least 42 Celsius, but preferably higher, in order to hatch properly; hence the sweltering heat inside the building where the Doctor was crouched, trying to come up with a plan that wouldn't end with them all sliced to ribbons by newborn Dromels or blown to pieces. Unfortunately for the greater London area, or at least everyone within a one block radius, the half-witted smugglers had gone about achieving this increase in ambient temperature via one of the most ill-advised feats of jiggery pokery he'd ever seen. Lacking the appropriate incubating equipment, they'd removed parts of their own ship's sublight engines, set them up like small pylons surrounding the eggs, and rigged a feedback loop through all of them back to an auxiliary power cell. It did indeed produce a lot of heat, but it was incredibly unstable and could quite easily be overloaded.

This would have been an excellent time to have a working sonic screwdriver, the Doctor thought as he calculated his chances of making it over to the controls without alerting the guards prematurely. The part of the original plan where his team would cut off the smugglers' possible escape route by shutting down the transmat system still needed doing. When he'd spotted the danger they were all in, he'd sent Addy and Quinn back to warn Rose before her team could find themselves in a very precarious situation. It wasn't exactly necessary that this message be delivered in person, since they were all carrying Torchwood issue communicators, but the Doctor had pulled rank on the two techs to make sure they were a safe distance away when he attempted to dismantle this unintentional booby trap.

Slipping out of his jacket and hoodie quietly, the Doctor squinted at his target; he was close enough to the eggs that in a few long strides he could be among them but there were at least two guards watching the hatching pen carefully, wary should any of their precious cargo begin to stir. That gave him an idea. Reaching into his pocket, the Doctor withdrew the palm sized glittery rubber ball that Tony had given him as a present when he and Rose had had dinner with the Tylers a few nights ago. As diversions went, this one was dead simple and probably one of the oldest tricks in the book, but these sorts of things didn't become classics because they didn't work.

Taking careful aim, the Doctor waited until the guards' backs were turned away from him and then stood quickly and hurled the ball across the warehouse, striking one of the eggs furthest from the controls with a satisfying "thwack!" It bounced off of his first target to do additional damage to a few other eggs nearby. The cracked eggs began releasing noxious green fumes and startling the guards into action. Having missed the flight of the rubber ball, they would believe that they had an early hatching on their hands and run to fetch a proper cage for the creatures.

When the guards acted exactly as he expected them to, he seized his chance and jumped up to dash to the controls. The panel was an absolute mess. Was this what passed for power regulators these days? The Doctor shook his head in amazement and set about untangling the wires feeding back to the power cell. They'd obviously not had a proper engineer on their crew. He hurried as best he could, fingers slick with sweat and glasses slipping down his nose. With any luck, his work here would serve the double purpose of cutting power to all of their equipment, transmats and egg warmers included.

His plan probably would have worked too, if it wasn't for one tiny factor that the Doctor had forgotten. The Dromel eggs, in addition to having vicious, bloodthirsty creatures inside, also contained a highly corrosive nutrient substance that did not agree with the wires strung between the heating pylons. The dripping Dromel goo caused a short and the Doctor had just enough warning when the panel in front of him showered him in sparks to turn and run for the exit as fast as his trainers could carry him.

Mercifully, the Doctor had managed to disconnect the power cell from the ship's primary engines, otherwise the blast would surely have killed them all. As it was, the shockwave from the power cell overloading threw him with considerable velocity into the wall and blew out all of the windows in the large warehouse.

Before he lost consciousness, the Doctor had just enough time to reflect that Rose was not going to be pleased with him.


	3. Grounded

The Doctor woke to the soft beeping of a cardiac monitor and the pervasive scent of industrial cleaning products. His mouth tasted strangely metallic and he felt oddly disconnected from his body. Opening his eyes, he observed that he was in a Torchwood medical suite. Rose had fallen asleep sitting at his bedside, one bent arm serving as a makeshift pillow while the other covered his own hand.

She was still dressed in the clothes she'd worn on their mission; he hadn't been out long enough for anyone to force her to return to their flat to change. He hesitated to wake her, no doubt she could use the rest, but he knew she'd sleep better later knowing that he was all right. The fact that _he'd_ sleep better having spoken with her and reassured himself that she was all right had nothing to do with it.

He tried to lean forward to gently stroke her hair but was halted by a stab of sharp pain in his side. Wincing, he pulled his arms in protectively around himself. Now that he was more awake, he realised that his ribs had been bound tightly and deep breaths had been temporarily added to the "do not attempt unless absolutely necessary" list. Considering that he'd been nearly at ground zero when that power cell blew, he supposed a few busted ribs were not to be unexpected.

His movements stirred Rose who shifted groggily and lifted her head to look at him.

"Doctor?"

"What's left of him," he tried for light-hearted, but his voice sounded more tired than he'd have liked. It hurt to speak and he fought the urge to cough, that'd be the last thing his aching chest needed right now.

Rose's eyes filled with relief and she leaned over to kiss him briefly. She wasn't particularly gentle about it, but he was hardly about to protest; he knew he'd scared her. Pulling back from him, her demeanour shifted abruptly, switching to professional concern as she evaluated him critically. Evidently deeming him fit enough, the Doctor warily noted the familiar way she set her jaw; he was in for a lecture, no doubt.

"Of all the daft, bloody-minded, idiotic things you've done, Doctor," she began, angrily, "what on _Earth_ possessed you to blow up the damn building?"

"That was an accident!" he protested.

She gave him a dubious look. "Accident or not, you shouldn't have been in there on your own. You could've easily been killed, taking on those smugglers by yourself." She silenced his further comments with a hand. "We have teams for a reason. All those times you got upset at me for wandering off; don't tell me you don't remember your own Rule Number One. It applies just as much to you now as it does the rest of us."

He looked away, guiltily. She continued, "I know you're used to charging in and saving the day. I can't expect you to change overnight after nine hundred years, but you've got to at least try to remember the rest of us are capable too."

His head jerked up, indignantly. "Of course I know that," he snapped before softening his tone, "saved the world too many times together, you an' me, not to know that." He sighed heavily and winced as his ribs reminded him of their presence. "'s just, following orders has never really been one of my strong suits," he huffed.

Rose rolled her eyes and stroked his hand in hers. "Silly Time Lord, I didn't cross the Void to lose you in a warehouse in Camden."

He gave her a wry look. "Perish the thought. It'll take more than a volatile power cell and a few weapons smugglers stroke amateur egg farmers to put me off my game. I've survived far worse, and on many occasions, still had time for tea after." His voice softened, in deference to her genuine concern, "I'll try to be more careful though." He squeezed her hand reassuringly.

She squeezed back and with a sigh of her own, pulled out her mobile to check her messages. "We've had two teams out all night clearing up at the warehouse," she reported, "Jake thinks they've accounted for all the creatures that were in those eggs. What are they called? Addy said you seemed like you recognised them."

"Surarin Dromels," he answered. "Nasty things; remember that time we were on that station outside of Alverian Four and that fellow kept trying to entice us to attend the fights?"

Rose shuddered. "That's what those were? Glad we skipped that invitation. I hope Jake's right and we've got them all." She tapped a few brief messages in reply and tucked the mobile in her pocket. "Dad'll be in shortly. You'll be hearing it from him too, I expect."

Sure enough, a minute later there was a firm knock at the door and Torchwood's Director entered the room.

"Doctor. I trust you have an excellent explanation for the incident at the warehouse and headache you've caused all of us this evening?" he began without preamble.

The Doctor grimaced and stared at the beige ceiling balefully. Pete Tyler was a good man, whom he respected a great deal, but that didn't make it any easier when he found himself called on the carpet like a child facing punishment for his misdeeds. He desperately missed his TARDIS at times like this. Used to be, he'd be long gone before the shouting started. It was like being stuck back at UNIT all over again. Perhaps he ought to suggest that Pete grow a moustache, since it seemed like they were making a habit of having conversations like this.

"In my defence, Director, I was attempting to prevent a much larger explosion at the time. One that might've caused injury to more than just myself had the team gone in unawares and stray gunfire ensued."

Pete pressed his thumb and fingers to the bridge of his nose as though this answer pained him. "While I appreciate your efforts to anticipate potential mission complications, Doctor, you can't just go haring off by yourself anymore, you work for Torchwood now. You are expected to communicate with your team and defer to the judgment of your field commander, not dive headfirst into the nearest patch of trouble."

He lowered his hand and looked sternly at the Doctor, his firm expression somewhat betrayed by the dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes. "This is the seventh time in four months that we've had to bring in a clean up team after a mission you've been involved in has resulted in significant property damage or landed someone in hospital."

The Doctor frowned. "Has it really been that many? Blimey."

"I'm suspending you from field duty until further notice. You'll be discharged in the morning and on temporary leave until you've been cleared by Torchwood Medical to return to work. Get some rest, Doctor."

He turned and left before the Doctor could mount a proper protest. Rose followed Pete into the hallway and he could hear their muffled voices through the door, but not clearly enough to make out their conversation. She returned after a few minutes with a sour expression on her face. He took that to mean she'd been unsuccessful in convincing her father to reconsider his suspension.

"Just _wizard_ ," he muttered to himself and leaned back into his pillow in defeat.

\-----

Elsewhere. In a small dark room buried deep beneath the city, a faint, slowly blinking light grew brighter, as long neglected machinery began to hum to life once again. 


	4. Recuperation

The Doctor was bored. It had been four days since he'd been released from hospital. Four days cooped up in the small two bedroom London flat he and Rose called home these days. He'd spent most of that time alone since Rose had gone back to work after having sat in vigil at his bedside that first night.

The first day had passed remarkably swiftly, due in large part to a generous allotment of narcotics; thank Gallifrey his hybrid physiology had proved amenable to most human pharmaceuticals. Otherwise, he suspected he'd have felt more than just groggy, bored, and tetchy.

To entertain himself without Rose there to talk to, the Doctor spent most of the second day watching telly and trying to guess which of the actors were actually aliens in disguise. He quickly gave that game up when he remembered that if they were, he'd likely have seen their Torchwood file already. He moved on to watching all of the films in Rose's small DVD collection and scrutinizing them for differences from the versions he remembered. That didn't occupy him for longer than halfway through day three though; Rose hadn't exactly spent much of her time at home watching movies while they'd been apart.

He'd eased off the prescription pain decreasers and switched to paracetemol by day four but his ribs still hurt every time he drew breath or moved. It was incredibly frustrating. If he'd still been his fully Time Lord self, his injuries would have been completely healed by now. He tried reading but found he couldn't keep his mind on the page in front of his face and holding up the book only made his side ache. Restless and grumpy, he wandered the flat in search of something to do. He thought perhaps there were a few home improvement projects that he could work on without putting too much strain on his injuries.

When Rose came home she found him sitting on the floor in the middle of their sitting room, surrounded by bits and pieces of the dishwasher. He was soaking wet, still wearing his jimjams and mismatched socks, both arms inside the upended appliance. A repurposed garden hose ran from the rear of the device down the hall to disappear inside the bathroom.

"Doctor!" she exclaimed, "what are you doing?"

He gave her a slightly abashed look, his brown eyes large behind the blue framed specs they'd gotten him to replace the pair he'd left with his other self, and she couldn't help but laugh at the picture he made. He was like a puppy that had been caught destroying a slipper, too adorable to be truly infuriating.

"Well... you'd been saying that it never managed to get the tea mugs properly clean. I thought I could do something about that for you." He smiled cheerfully.

"You're supposed to be resting," she said, setting down her bag and moving to the kitchen to make herself a cuppa, stepping over several appliance parts in the process.

"Been doing that. Got bored. Tinkering is just like resting, only more productive."

"No, it isn't." Rose tried to fill the kettle but discovered the faucet wasn't working; the Doctor had at least thought to shut the water off before disconnecting the dishwasher. She had to use the bathroom sink instead, temporarily disconnecting the hose the Doctor had attached to it. She tossed him a dry towel on her way back to the kitchen and set the kettle to boil with a sigh.

While she rummaged through the jumble of tins in the cupboard, looking for her favourite tea, she asked him, "I thought we agreed you weren't going to disassemble any more of the kitchen after you nearly burned down the flat?"

"Very little risk of fire with this, I'm modifying the water jets." He indicated the plastic fitting he'd been screwing in place. "I was hoping to have it back together before you got home. Lost track of the time." He kept his voice light so that it didn't betray how much it hurt him that it was so much easier for that to happen to him since the metacrisis.

His time senses were not totally gone but they were noticeably weaker and it took much more concentration for him to use what had once been second nature to him. His pride had thus far prevented him from fully discussing this change with Rose, in part because he still wanted her to think of him as the Time Lord he once was and in part because he was afraid of what it might mean for their future. Even if he did manage to grow a new TARDIS, what good was a broken Time Lord? Without full use of his time senses, he was liable to get them both killed or accidentally change something that they shouldn't.

Rose interrupted his thoughts before he could spiral further down that avenue of self pity and doubt again. "If you're well enough to make this much of a mess, you're well enough to do your tinkering outside of the flat. Why don't you go check on the TARDIS tomorrow while I'm at work? Your follow up appointment with Medical is on Friday, think you can manage to entertain yourself for one more day without blowing anything up?" she teased.

He pouted and joined her in the kitchen, kissing her cheek before responding with, "I suppose."

She snorted and fetched two mugs from a cabinet. "Just have it back how it was before bed, yeah?"

He nodded and grinned at her, retrieving a spanner he'd left on the counter.

She recounted the details of her day to him as she finished making the tea. The Doctor returned to reassembling the dishwasher and listened to her descriptions of the clean up efforts relating to the botched warehouse mission and the latest in an on-going saga of diplomatic hijinks involving a species of sentient mould that had been snacking on London's pigeon population.

Later that evening, they ventured out to nip down the street for fish and chips in the pub before retiring early. It was altogether more domestic than the Doctor had ever imagined his life becoming, but not nearly as panic inducing as it had been six months ago. He was John, he told himself, he could be John. Human life wasn't all that bad when you had someone to share it with.

\-----

Zora had eaten well tonight; she'd managed to get to the shelter before they ran out of the good stuff. They'd offered her a bed again, but she'd seen Max was there as well, and she couldn't sleep with him there. Max was one of Them. She didn't trust Them. They made the stars go away and then told her nothing was wrong when she tried to make Them listen. They were always listening to the wrong things. She'd seen what happened to people who listened to the wrong things; those people had their souls carved out and were left to walk the Earth as metal monsters.

She bed down in her favourite spot, a sheltered bit of dry ground that was kept warm by a nearby vent from the Underground. It was far enough from the Market and heavy pedestrian traffic that the Bobbies usually left her be. The night air was frigid as she buried herself under several layers of filthy blankets. Within minutes, she was sound asleep.

In the wee hours of the morning, something rattled the ventilation grate, but Zora was far too used to sleeping rough to stir. It often rattled when the tube passed underneath; if that bothered her, she'd never get a night's rest. Had she woken sooner though, she might've seen the small, rodent-sized silvery shapes emerge from the vent and scuttle towards her prone form. It probably still would not have given her enough time to save her own life. As it was, her terrified screams as they swarmed her body were silenced before anyone had a chance to mark them.

\-----

The warehouse was one of a number of similar properties that Torchwood had acquired in the rebuilding years following the conflict the people of Pete's World had taken to calling the Cybus War. There had been approximately five million casualties between the initial mass conversion and the Cyber forces' final departure through the void in 2008. Most of Cybus Industry's assets were seized by government entities in the aftermath and a large number of other properties similarly ended up in administrative limbo on the presumed death or conversion of their owners or as a result of the economic crash that followed. Many of these remained vacant nearly six years later despite claims that things were indeed improving.

For the Doctor's purposes however, it mattered mostly that this particular warehouse was a suitable environment for him to grow a baby TARDIS without interference and away from the prying eyes of his fellow Torchwood employees. Pete had given him permission to use it and had kept their arrangement off of the official books, just in case. The Doctor might be willing to lend his services to helping Torchwood protect the Earth from alien threats, but he wasn't willing to risk allowing them access to a functioning time machine.

One of the first things he'd installed in the building had been a primitive perception filter to ensure that most people who walked inside would assume it to be abandoned and leave without looking too closely. It worked well enough that he had to squint to see past it to find the door to his secret lab, a room Rose had affectionately called "Dagobah", as a nod to its swampy atmosphere. He'd followed Donna's advice regarding accelerating the growth matrix, but thus far, the hand-sized section of coral from his TARDIS had barely changed.

He wasn't sure what exactly he'd done wrong, but he feared that they'd all forgotten one vital detail when his counterpart had handed him the cutting; his TARDIS was native to a different universe than this. If the original couldn't draw her energies from this universe when he and Rose had first fallen into it accidentally, how could her child be expected to thrive here? His only hope was to somehow attune her to their new home before the matrix broke down entirely and the little coral perished along with his dreams of travelling through all of time and space again.

He'd been ruminating on plans for a magnification array to try and stimulate the coral's artron receptors for a few weeks now but hadn't had the opportunity to put his theory into practice. It was perhaps one of the few benefits of having been placed on medical leave that he now had a whole day to devote to this problem. He winced as he bent to check that he had everything with him that he needed and set to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing on this one has been slow-going, but I do intend to see it through. More soon!


	5. Familiar Faces

Having been cleared to return to duty on Monday with a stern admonition from Dr. Samuels to 'try avoiding explosives for a while', the Doctor and Rose spent a relatively uneventful weekend together, the highlight of which was shopping for a replacement dishwasher, after the Doctor's efforts to revive the machine were less than successful. (How was he to have known that the motor would burn out if he tripled the water pressure? Terrible engineering quality on the manufacturer's part to have the tolerances so low.) Rose had merely sighed and told him that he could choose the new one, but would not be allowed, under any circumstances, to modify it.

He was honestly quite surprised at how relieved he was to see the sleek Torchwood building as they exited the Tube station at Canary Wharf on Monday morning. It hadn't been that long since this part of London had served as an unhappy reminder of everything he had lost. Perhaps this place was growing on him after all.

"Oi, Skinny!" A brash female voice greeted the Doctor in the narrow hallway leading toward Torchwood's research and development department. Rose had left him at the lift, headed to her own office. "What sort of bloke nearly gets himself blown to smithereens and doesn't bother to ring his sister to let her know he's safe and out of hospital?"

"Sorry, I figured Rose would've done," he apologised, flinching as she enveloped him in a firm hug. "Ow, ow, ow! Fractured ribs, Donna!"

"Ooh, sorry." She released him. "What's all this I hear about you getting banished permanently to R&D then?" she asked, crossing her arms and giving him a shrewd look.

"I haven't been banished! At least, not _permanently_..."

He relayed the tale of the incident at the warehouse and his subsequent punishment as they walked. The Doctor had been shocked to see Donna, or at least this universe's version of her, when he first came to work for Torchwood last summer. So much so that he may have said a bit more than he should have when he first met her. Accidentally, of course.

This version, Donna Temple-Noble, was happily married to a man who wasn't (as far as the Doctor knew) plotting to feed her to any ancient spider-creatures nesting at the centre of the planet, and lived with her husband and grandfather in the modest house left to her following her mother's tragic death during the Cybus War. (Typical Donna luck, she'd never fancied the ear pods that everyone started wearing back then, even argued with her mum that they were terribly naff, a bit of rebellion that ended up saving her life.)

Torchwood had brought her in under the pretence of a job interview to scan her for anomalies when Rose's trips with the dimension cannon revealed that her alternate universe self was travelling as the Doctor's current companion. Unlike her counterpart, multiple timelines were not converging on this Donna, but that didn't stop her from talking her way into an actual position with Torchwood's human resources department during the interview. Amidst all the confusion surrounding Rose's final jumps, the confrontation with the Daleks, and subsequent aftermath, no one thought to warn the Doctor that she'd been added to the organization's payroll.

So when the newly minted Dr. John Noble, fresh off of the conclusion of a super secret, hush-hush operation involving parallel worlds (that Donna was most certainly NOT supposed to know about but did anyway) appeared in human resources for his new employee orientation and greeted her like a long-lost relative whom he thought he'd never see again, naturally, she had a few questions. Chief among them, who was this strange skinny bloke, and why was he sobbing about meta-crises into her shoulder?

In the interests of security, the explanation that they settled on to give her was that he was indeed an immigrant from a parallel universe (true), and that he'd reacted so strongly to her because in that universe, Donna Noble had a younger brother, namely, him (true-ish, if you squinted a bit). As this Doctor had bits of the other Donna's memories swimming around in the back corners of his brain, it really wasn't that difficult for him to edit himself into the family history. He could remember fighting with "their" mother, climbing the hill to stargaze with "their" grandfather, and the last thing "their" father had said before they lost him to cancer. And since Donna had donated a significant portion of his new mixed genetic code to him, he might as well be her brother. It was less disturbing than thinking of her as his mother.

To her credit, after an initial period of vocal incredulity, this Donna had taken the revelation that she now had (sort of) a new younger brother in stride. She adopted him immediately and insisted on taking him home to meet Shaun and her grandfather. Pete was not best pleased with this, but calmed somewhat when Rose vouched for the other Wilf's character and courage in fighting the Daleks.

Rose had come along to the house in Chiswick as well, to make sure Donna or the Doctor didn't let anything classified slip, and spent the entire evening trying not to laugh at how much this Doctor slipped into similar mannerisms and speech patterns around her family. An outside observer would have difficulty taking them for anything other than siblings. It helped that the Doctor's relationship with his Donna hadn't been all that different really.

Wilf took to his new grandson with similar enthusiasm and the pair bonded over astronomy and talk of alien worlds. Shaun was more hesitant, but friendly; his calm, cheerful personality was a good counter-point to Donna's fiery passion. His scepticism faded as the evening went on and he eventually settled into a conversation with Rose about her field work and why, if the official government position was that alien life did exist, were they so reluctant to talk about it.

The Doctor had been wandering the universe for so long, to suddenly find himself drawn into not one, but two close familial units was jarring to say the least. On Gallifrey, his relationship with his genetic relations had been fraught at best, one of the many reasons he'd chosen to leave. Susan being one of the few exceptions, he'd still seen very little of her after leaving her behind on Earth with David. He'd always considered his friends and travelling companions to be his surrogate family over the years, but this felt different. Donna's memories made it all seem familiar to him, eerily so, yet he'd never experienced it before. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about it; it was one more way that John was different from the Doctor. It was very human.

To complicate matters, there was still some measure of guilt every time he saw this Donna, knowing the likely fate of her counterpart. It weighed on him, though he knew that they were two separate people. Fortunately, this Donna was just as unwilling to put up with his brooding as the other, so it wasn't often that he was allowed to dwell on it in her presence.

\-----

Rose leaned in through the open door to a sophisticated business suite on the top floor of the building. "Morning, Ianto. My dad in yet?" she asked of her father's personal assistant.

"He's on a call with the Ministry at the moment, Miss Tyler; is it urgent?" the polite Welshman answered from his polished reception desk.

She shook her head. "No, I can come back later. How was your weekend? The twins doing well?"

After spending so many months consumed with a single-minded dedication to the dimension cannon project and finding the Doctor, Rose had been making an effort to reengage herself with the lives of those around her. Ianto Jones-Hallet was married to Lisa, one of Torchwood's researchers, but she was currently still on leave after giving birth to the couple's first children a few months ago.

Beaming with fatherly pride, he happily produced a photograph (or twelve) on his mobile to show her. Knowing very little about babies herself, she smiled and listened politely to his excited descriptions of their development and sleep schedules. She really liked Ianto and was excited for him, but it was a good thing she didn't have anything pressing on for this morning, she thought to herself.

\-----

"Ah, the prodigal returns," Dr. Lincoln's Edinburgh accent greeted him in the lab. "I hear you'll be staying with us permanently now, Dr. Noble."

"Why does everyone keep saying that?" the Doctor grumbled to himself, but raised his voice to answer her cheerily, "wouldn't want you lot getting lost without me, Amanda."

She snorted and returned to her office with the parting shot, "try not to blow anything up."

Malcolm Taylor appeared from the adjacent kitchenette carrying a steaming cup of coffee and grinned when he saw the Doctor. "John! Good to see you're in one piece; we heard what happened in Camden. Frightening stuff." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Don't let Amanda fool you; she was just as worried when they said you'd been taken to hospital as the rest of us."

He sat at his computer and sipped carefully at his beverage. "Quinn let me look at the remains of one of those eggs. Blimey, wouldn't want those things loose in London. Do you know what they were bringing them here for?"

"Gambling most likely," the Doctor replied, logging in to what was nominally his own workstation.

His desk was littered with half-finished projects and empty tea mugs, nearly as cluttered as his workbench at home. A grainy photograph of his TARDIS, taken from CCTV footage when they'd landed in this universe accidentally seven years ago, replaced the Torchwood logo on his screen.

Evidently the appearance of a blue police box on the streets of London had been a curious enough occurrence to warrant a minor inquiry. All of the legitimate police boxes in the Britain of Pete's World were red, as it turned out. Of course, any investigation had been promptly forgotten when Lumic's mass cyber conversions kicked off that evening, but the photographs and file had been retained by the Met. Rose had given it to him, saying that Pete had found it for her when they'd been separated.

"They're used in competitive fighting in some of the less reputable parts of this galaxy," the Doctor continued. "Too vicious for exotic pets. Though, I have been surprised before."

The enthusiastic scientist had long become used to his colleague's casual references to extraterrestrial happenings, so Malcolm carried on their conversation without comment on how precisely, had the Doctor come to possess this information. "How large is an adult?" he inquired, curiously.

"About a metre high, if you're lucky; the females tend to be a bit larger," the Doctor replied and Malcolm's eyes widened.

"Goodness. Not a creature I'd like to meet in a dark alley."

"Nor I," the Doctor agreed. Changing the subject, he asked, "anything exciting happen here while I was away?"

Malcolm shook his head and laughed. "Not unless you count the pieces of that engine you blew up that they brought in. They're still picking through it next door. It looked like tech we've seen before though." The Doctor nodded.

Now that this Torchwood was an officially recognised government agency, they had a standing obligation to share some of their information with the European Space Agency, which was busy constructing what would become Earth's first ships capable of interplanetary travel within their solar system. The propulsion technology being used was, in part, based on tech that Torchwood had reverse engineered from alien salvage over the years.

It was a tricky situation for the Time Lord; the Doctor knew a great deal more about starship design and many other things than he shared. When he'd been with Unit, he'd remained silent out of responsibility for protecting the time line. Now though, this Earth was his home, and he had no idea what its future held with his stunted time senses and without a working TARDIS.

He'd only agreed to work for Torchwood under the explicit understanding that there were some things he couldn't give them, that the human race wasn't ready for. He would help protect the planet, and save lives where he could, but he'd seen firsthand what rapid technological advancement could do to a species and it was rarely pretty. The Torchwood he knew from his original universe wouldn't have agreed to this proviso, but Pete Tyler was not a stupid man. After the disaster that Lumic caused with the Cybermen, he had reason to be distrustful of humanity's ability to adapt sensibly.

\-----

"Hullo, Rose." Jake Simmonds' black-clad figure appeared in her doorway.

Rose set down her reading glasses and pushed back from her keyboard to grin at her fellow agent. They didn't get to work together often enough these days now that they were heading up separate teams. "Hello yourself. What's up?"

"Heard the Doc was back in the building today, you must be relieved." His eyes twinkled merrily.

"You don't know the half of it; did I tell you he destroyed our dishwasher while I was at work?"

He chuckled. "Knowing the Doctor, it could've been worse. Pain meds must've been slowing him down."

Rose smiled. "Very possible. What're you working on today?" she asked, noticing the file in his hands.

"Courtesy check for the Met, seems several homeless folks disappeared mysteriously over the weekend. Police are handling the primary investigation, wanted to know if we've seen anything on our end to suggest ET involvement." The look he gave her made her suspect there was a question there he hadn't asked.

"And I suppose you're wondering if I'd speak with our friends the Flr'garan Mould Collective to see if they know anything?"

"Would you?" He gave her his best pleading look. She laughed.

"All right, but you owe me; I had to shower three times to get the smell to go away last time." She shooed him out of her office and closed the door behind him so that she could change into her field gear. There was no way she was meeting with the Flr'garan again without a sturdy pair of boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, it's been a while since I updated this one, hasn't it? I think I've gotten over the mental hitch that was hanging me up on the plotting for this story, but we'll see. (I was thinking about it too seriously, needed to remind myself that this is DOCTOR WHO and I'm writing a Cybermen story, it's really okay if it has a few silly moments; it's supposed to be fun!) Also - hey look, Alt!Donna! and Wilf! and Ianto and Malcolm and Jake! There will be a few more surprise faces popping up in the coming chapters as well, stay tuned! 
> 
> Reader feedback is lovely to receive, as always!


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